12 Days, 2012 miles, and we have finally arrived at Green River Lake State Park, Campbellsville, Kentucky…ready to start our fourth season working at Amazon!

We had a pretty quiet, uneventful drive after leaving from Chalk Creek Campground in Nathrop Colorado. We dropped a little further south and picked up Highway 50 heading east out of Colorado. The drive was beautiful through Bighorn Sheep Canyon, and as we drove the twisty roads, after all summer, we finally saw a herd of female bighorn sheep, right alongside the road. I thought it would be a much nicer, quieter drive than heading out through Colorado Springs, and I was right :-). We stopped for the night in Lamar CO, on the Kansas/Colorado border. I had decided to break up the roughly 900 mile drive from Nathrop to Osage Beach Missouri into three days. I find that 300 miles a day is a pretty good limit to my driving endurance; if I don’t need to go further than that, I’d rather not.

We continued across Kansas on Highway 50/400, a decent two lane highway. The only difficult thing about avoiding the interstates is the lack of large fuel stops or rest areas. I had to carefully plan where we would stop for refueling and lunch along the way. I found truckstopsonline, where I could gather information on big rig fuel stations on any highway in any state, not just the interstates. It really helped as we traveled. We stopped in Goddard KS on the second night, just outside Wichita. We then followed Highway 54 straight into Osage Beach MO, right by Lake of the Ozarks State Park. We stayed at Osage Beach RV Park, which was a very nice private RV park. One of the nicest we’ve stayed at. We decided to spend three nights here (they had a three night mid-week special price) and it looked like a nice area to rest for a couple of days. Unfortunately, the weather was not looking very good, so our first day there we went to the state park in the morning and took a long walk with the dogs to stretch the old leg muscles.

Lake of the Ozarks is really nice. It’s very large, with fingers reaching out in all directions.

It seems like a highly desirable area, both for year round residents and summer homes. Some of the homes along the lake shore were beautiful.